Snowden Revelations

This page catalogs various revelations by Edward Snowden, regarding the United States’ surveillance activities.

Each disclosure is assigned to one of the following categories: tools and methods, overseas USG locations from which operations are undertaken, foreign officials and systems that NSA has targeted, encryption that NSA has broken, ISPs or platforms that NSA has penetrated or attempted to penetrate, and identities of cooperating companies and governments. Each entry includes the date the information was first published.

The page will be updated from time to time and is intended as a resource regarding Snowden and the debate over U.S. surveillance. Comments and suggestions thus are welcomed, and should be sent to [email protected]

In addition to this page, Lawfare has cataloged and summarized the FISA documents the government has declassified in response to the Snowden controversy in the Wiki Document Library.

1. Tools and methods

October 10, 2014: NSA participates in a variety of “human intelligence” programs that are grouped under the codenames TAREX and Sentry Eagle.

September 14, 2014: NSA and GCHQ infiltrated several German and global telecom companies to build the Treasure Map program, which seeks, to “map the entire Internet – any device, anywhere, all the time.”

Treasure Map is a vast NSA campaign to map the global internet. The program doesn’t just seek to chart data flows in large traffic channels, such as telecommunications cables. Rather, it seeks to identify and locate every single device that is connected to the internet somewhere in the world—every smartphone, tablet, and computer—”anywhere, all the time,” according to NSA documents

August 25, 2014: NSA allows two dozen U.S. government agencies to use ICREACH, a “Google-like” search engine that accesses phone calls, emails, and other forms of online communication of foreigners and U.S. citizens.

August 13, 2014: NSA has an autonomous program called “MonsterMind” that can respond to cyber attacks from other countries without human intervention.

June 18, 2014: NSA leverages XKeyscore in Germany to penetrate internet traffic and monitor targets in Europe and Africa.

July 9, 2014: NSA and FBI targeted five Muslim-American leaders for surveillance, including the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a former Bush Administration official who held a top-secret clearance.

July 1, 2014: NSA received permission to spy on the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the People’s Party in Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood and National Salvation Front in Egypt, the Amal Movement in Lebanon, and the Bolivarian Continental Coordinator in Venezuela.

May 19, 2014: NSA has collected the contents of all cell phone calls in the Bahamas and stored the data for up to a month.

December 29, 2013: NSA penetrated the network of Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Security to collect information about drug and human trafficking along the US-Mexico border. This collection stopped after the media reported on it in October 2013.

August 4, 2014: NSA has increased the surveillance assistance it provides to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit, including monetary support for covert operations.

July 25, 2014: NSA has significantly expanded its relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior by providing it “direct and analytic technical support” on “internal security” matters.

May 19, 2014: NSA has worked with General Dynamics to collect the contents or metadata of all cell phone calls in the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. The Australian Signals Directorate has cooperated with NSA on the collection in the Philippines.

April 30, 2014: GCHQ had extensive access to NSA’s PRISM data during the London Olympics and later sought similar access on an ongoing basis.

December 20, 2013: NSA entered into a contract with RSA to use an NSA formula as the default option for number generation in the Bsafe security software, enabling NSA to penetrate the software more easily. RSA asked consumers to stop using the formula after the Snowden leaks revealed its weaknesses.

December 17, 2013: The Norwegian Intelligence Service cooperates with NSA to collect information about Russia, particularly Russian military activities in the Kola Peninsula and Russian energy policy.

November 17, 2013: The Australian Signals Directorate cooperated with NSA in an attempt to monitor the communications of senior Indonesian officials, including the President, the Vice President, and several ministers.